check-user

Any chance to see a solution soon?

As you pointed out correctly, we need some kind of special treatment for USP5. An idea might be to slipstream USP5 as a normal service pack (not to treat it as a giant hotfix) but include the filelist of USP5 in HFslip and countercheck every hotfixes' file with it. But you see, this is a real problem. At first I thought it is not but on closer inspection, nearly every new hotfix contains outdated files. This means that with every new patch integrated we destroy some of Gurgelmeyer's work because unofficial but newer files are overwritten.

Hi folks, I suppose that a lot of you have heard of Gurgelmeyer's Hotstream/USP5 project. In short, Gurgelmeyer collected hundreds (more than 400) official Microsoft hotfixes and patches for Windows 2000. He collected those patches and developed a method to safely slipstream then into Windows 2000 like an official Service pack. Since Gurgelmeyer - who unfortunately has not been seen for a year now - spent a lot of time and diligence in this pack, it is still worth keeping it as a base on which the newer updates (from Feb. 2006 on) can be applied. This sounds great but recently I discovered a major problem: Apparently Microsoft themselves do not know about their own development progress. Obviously Gurgelmeyer had access to patches and fixes - of course only official Microsoft files - which are not known by some of their developers Why is this a problem? Because newer fixes (I count about 40 to be added on top of USP5) contain files which are in fact outdated, compared with those already included in USP5! According to my testings, Hfslip does overwrite those USP5 files with the older versions from added hotfixes. I had a look at a few of those hotfixes and they sometimes contain only a few newer files but old versions as well. The only possible solution is that Hfslip checks the fileversion (Build-number) and compares it if there are different versions of the same file. This requires the cab-packed files of the USP5 to be unpacked first. Because Gurgelmeyer has not been seen for a long time it seems to be unlikely that he might return and update his USP5 - only Gurgelmeyer can do this because he has developed the necessary tools.